The American college campus as we know it—with buildings organized in a parklike setting—turns 200 this spring. A couple of weeks ago that milestone was celebrated with a weekend-long symposium here at Union College, where in early 1813 a collaboration between a French architect and the college’s president produced a remarkable series of plans and drawings that Union has stuck by, more or less, ever since. Just as importantly, those plans have indirectly influenced schemes for numerous other institutions—starting, most likely, with Thomas Jefferson’s famous plan for the University of Virginia.
The Union drawings were not the first for a group of American academic buildings, said Paul Venable Turner, author of Campus: An American Planning Tradition, an encyclopedic 1984 work that traces American colleges’ layouts back to the mid-1600s. In 1792, the artist John Trumbull drew a master plan for Yale University that is believed to be the oldest surviving scheme for an American campus, but it envisioned a simple row of buildings, which was how many colleges were laid out at the time. The 1813 Union plan, on the other hand, called for a series of buildings and arcades arranged in an inverted U on a man-made terrace, with a large lawn in the middle and gardens beyond. The crucial focal point of the design was to be a round building with a dome, possibly a chapel.
Mr. Turner, an emeritus professor of art history at Stanford University, was also a member of the Union Class of 1962, which explains his continuing interest in the designs for the college. They were discovered in 1932 in the attic of a building that had once housed the library, and the portfolio in which they were found contained 35 sheets, some with drawings on both sides. Among them are completed campus plans showing buildings, gardens, and streams in color, construction drawings showing details of framing, bricks, and ornaments, floor plans of unbuilt structures, and pencil sketches, some of them so rough that they look like they might have been made in the heat of conversation: Well, what if we did this?
The drawings are the work of Joseph Ramée, who left France during the French Revolution and spent the rest of his life trying to establish himself somewhere else. Invited to the United States by David Parish, a financier who hoped to develop upstate New York, Ramée lived in Philadelphia from 1812 to 1816. His first visit to Union came in January 1813, when Parish introduced the architect to Eliphalet Nott, an energetic Presbyterian minister who had been Union’s president since 1804 and had decided to move the growing college from downtown Schenectady to a sloping tract he had purchased east of town. Nott had already had part of the site cleared and graded, and foundations were in place for two buildings, about 600 feet apart, that would face the city.
No record survives of what Ramée and Nott discussed—"the only evidence we have is the drawings themselves,” Mr. Turner told those attending the symposium. But the architect came back to Schenectady in late April or early May. Mr. Turner theorizes that Ramée brought with him the 13 surviving sheets of drawings for a large building that “was to contain all the college functions except the dormitories"—classrooms, a chapel, a library, and the president’s residence.
Nott may have envisioned such a building sitting between dormitories that would soon be built on the two foundations. Still known as North and South Colleges, each housed students in its middle sections and faculty members on both ends, as student guides pointed out while leading tours during the symposium. Drawings of the two dormitories were not found in the Ramée portfolio, but their arcaded brickwork is consistent with that of Ramée’s other drawings for Union—all of them in a subdued classical style.
“For Ramée a row of buildings would have been totally boring.”
Most likely, his drawings were used in constructing the two buildings and were then lost. In fact, all of the building drawings discovered in 1932 are for structures that were never put up, which adds to the challenge of reconstructing the evolution of the campus plan. Copies of the drawings were on display during the symposium, and are also available on Union’s Web site.
“The question is what Nott had in mind before Ramée came on the scene,” Mr. Turner said during one symposium session. North and South Colleges, he noted, are separated by three times the width of the University of Virginia’s lawn. “I’m sure Nott was thinking of a row. The Yale row was the last word in what colleges should look like.”
“But for Ramée a row of buildings would have been totally boring,” Mr. Turner said. “He would’ve wanted to set the central one back"—perhaps the origin of the inverted-U scheme. As for who had the idea subsequently to eliminate the central building and distribute its functions among other structures, we may never know. What is clear is that when Ramée returned, Mr. Turner said, “suddenly they’re talking about a much grander plan,” though possibly with the help of a translator, since no evidence has turned up that Ramée spoke English.
The commission was the largest of Ramée’s career, said Mr. Turner, who in 1996 published a book about the architect. For the Union plans, he said, Ramée would have taken his inspiration from 18th-century designs for large French institutions, especially hospitals, and from country estates with elaborate landscapes.
The drawings in the margins show the architect’s mind at work—toying with tiny arrangements of groups of buildings, with outlines of landscapes, even with a quick sketch of a Pantheonlike rotunda startlingly similar to the one Jefferson later designed for his academical village. “You can almost imagine Ramée and Nott sitting together and talking and Ramée making these drawings,” Mr. Turner said.
But plans go awry. Nott, though he remained in office 62 years, never found money enough to realize all of Ramée’s grand design. Until the 1850s, the campus consisted only of North and South Colleges and a pair of perpendicular arcades connecting them to nothing. Then, finally, buildings were built to Ramée’s plans on the ends of the arcades.
In 1858 work began on the foundation for the rotunda, but Nott died in 1866 and the building was completed by his grandson, the architect Edward Tuckerman Potter. Although an 1856 inventory of the Ramée portfolio shows that Potter had borrowed a series of Ramée drawings that were apparently never returned, the building ended up looking nothing like what the French architect imagined. Instead, it’s a 16-sided, polychromatic fantasy on Victorian themes, with elaborate pointed arches and a dome featuring a Hebrew text in red slate. (The text is usually translated as “The work is great, the day is short, the wages are ample, the master presses the workmen.”) Inside, iron columns support two galleries, and 709 colored-glass “illuminators” create a mysterious pattern of stars under the dome.
The building, restored in the 1990s, is one of the most spectacular on any American college campus, but also one of the most curious. It was originally called Graduates’ Hall and seems to have had no particular purpose, plus it was hard to heat. In 1902, the college used a grant from Andrew Carnegie to convert it into a library, a role it retained into the 1960s. Known as the Nott Memorial, it is now again a special-events space.
If Ramée’s intentions were set aside here, they were influential elsewhere. In 1814, he exhibited his Union College drawings in Philadelphia, and Mr. Turner is fairly certain that the American architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, who knew of Ramée, must have seen the exhibition. In 1817, Jefferson solicited Latrobe’s advice on plans for the University of Virginia, and Latrobe responded with a letter that, while it does not mention Ramée or Union, includes a sketch of a Pantheonlike rotunda linked to pavilions by colonnades. It is strikingly similar to drawings Ramée made in the margins of various plans for Union.
Jefferson subsequently—and famously—included just such a building at the head of his lawn, and it in turn influenced generations of architects working on college designs—for the old New York University campus that is now Bronx Community College, for Columbia University, and for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to name just a few.
Ramée’s scheme for Union, Mr. Turner said, was the first “truly comprehensive plan conceiving buildings in their context” on an American campus. It was “a completely new type” for higher education—and certainly worth celebrating.
